Video: How To Make A Healthy Meal From Your Local Bodega

Greetings, sophisticated urbanites! Are you low on funds? Saving up for some Louboutins? Or simply too lazy to walk an extra few blocks to the nearest grocery store? Here’s a video on how to make a healthy meal with ingredients found at your local bodega.

In this L Magazine produced clip, Ella Nemcova of food company Regal Vegan affably demonstrates how to make a healthy (and dare I say, tasty-looking?) meal with stuff you can find at most of New York’s cheap, tiny, Caribbean focused convenience stores. For optimal nutritional value, she advises you skip over canned stews for rice, beans, veggies, and other whole foods. $20 and an hour or so of slicing and simmering later, she’s got a complete, fancy-looking meal for four that looks like this:

Holy crap, I think I’m actually going to try making that.

As some of you sharp-eyed commenters will no doubt point out, it’s true that both Nemcova and the healthy bodega meal are vegan, and hence potentially judgmental. But whether you’re vegan, omnivorous, or something in between, do you really want to buy meat from a bodega?